TED Talks Daily - Ask dumb questions, embrace mistakes — and other lessons on innovation | Dave Raggio

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

To launch new initiatives within the confines of a large corporation, you'll need to work with the system, not against it, says "intrapreneur" Dave Raggio. He shares three lessons on innovation he learned the hard way — so you don't have to. (Made in partnership with Intuit)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Instead of being entrepreneurs, you can be an intrapreneur, working toward innovations and solutions within the company you already work for. In his 2024 talk, Intuit Vice President Dave Raggio takes us through lessons from working on a Skunk Works team inside his larger business and how the rest of us can do it too. It's coming up after the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb.

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Two years ago, I became an accidental entrepreneur, meaning an entrepreneur, but within a larger company. Didn't mean to. When I started at Intuit in 2020, my job was to do marketing and advertising for QuickBooks. But it was in that position that I saw an opportunity, an opportunity for Intuit to help connect our small business customers with complementary products and services

that would help them grow and thrive, while also being good for our business. Now, I sat on the idea for a while, really wanting to focus on the work that was right in front of me, but I couldn't shake it. So I eventually pulled together a proposal, brought it to our leadership team, and much to my surprise, they said, go pursue it.

And it was at that moment I started making every mistake possible and trying to bring it to life. But through those mistakes, I've learned what it means to be a successful entrepreneur, and I'm going to share those mistakes today in the hopes that if there's anyone that has an idea and wants to build something from within, that this can be helpful.

So the first lesson I learned was to socialize your vision early and often. I had romanticized the idea of a skunkworks-like startup within Intuit. I built a lean team. We worked in the shadows. Everything was on a need-to-know basis. The more people that got involved, the more process,

the more bureaucracy, the more opinions, it was just going to slow us down. And it worked. But not very long. The problem was, as we started to grow and become a legitimate business, I needed the support from a lot more teams, and I didn't have it.

Some of the most uncomfortable conversations I had with my coworkers was going to someone that I knew was stretched thin, had no idea what I was working on, and telling them that they needed to carve out additional time to help support it. I was not very popular in those moments. In my attempt to move fast, I made us move slow, because with every new team that we approached,

we were starting from scratch and had to paint that picture over and over again. This is also when I learned the value of a well-placed happy hour, or coffee break. So I realized it was really important for me to establish a human connection and not a transactional one. So I'd ask my colleagues to go out and grab a beer or coffee, and we would talk.

And in those conversations, I would learn about their workload, their resource constraints, about what energizes them and their teams. It was also an opportunity for me to share my vision, why I was excited, and what I thought I could do for our customers and our business. And now, back to the episode. The second lesson that I learned, very similar to the first but on the flip side, is this idea of listening early and often. I had been in marketing for almost 20 years at that point.

I had worked on Super Bowl ads, global brand campaigns. I thought I knew everything that there was to know about marketing and advertising. And because of that, I had a crystal-clear picture in my head of how I wanted every piece to work in this new initiative. When someone would say that something was impossible or had a difference of opinion, I immediately labeled them as blockers.

They were either not understanding what we were doing, they were scared or simply just didn't want to do the hard thing. The truth was, I was grossly overconfident in my understanding of everything. I knew very little about corporate accounting principles. I knew enough to be dangerous about things like privacy law. And those quote-unquote blockers were actually deeply invested in the success and were trying to prevent me from making the mistakes

that would get the project killed. And to be clear, I was making a lot of mistakes. It's only because of them that the project not only lived on, but thrived. Listening became so important to the project that we implemented something that we called dumb question sessions. These were a safe place, judgment-free zones, where myself and others could ask questions that maybe we were nervous to ask in other forums.

Maybe because we should have known the answer to those. Maybe because it's obvious to the rest of the organization, but just because of the role that we sit in, we are never exposed to it. Regardless, the purpose of it was to have a shared understanding of all parts of our business. I remember one specific example where there was an acronym that had been used for weeks, and I didn't know what it was.

I didn't ask early on. So much time had gone by that I felt like I was trapped. I didn't want to ask at that point. I thought I was going to have to live with this lie for the rest of my life. But it was because of the dumb question session and the judgment-free zone that I was able to ask and fill in all the gaps. And actually, one note on that last example.

I'm pretty sure there was a little bit of judgment, but I think I deserved it. So the last lesson that I learned, and the one that I feel is most important and possibly counterintuitive, is that the stakes can be quite high. Your personal risk tolerance doesn't matter. If you go out and start your own business and it fails, it is not a good thing.

It can add stress to your family, obviously financial implications. Intuit was founded on trying to make sure that that doesn't happen. But if it does, it's relatively contained. If I were to do something that compromises our customers' trust in our products and our brand, or create a poor product experience for our QuickBooks product, the implications can be far-reaching.

It can impact a lot of small businesses. You can't shoot from the hip. That's not to say that you need to work out of a sense of fear, either. You just have to be super thoughtful about how every decision you make, how every action you take, could impact the broader organization. To wrap up, again, if you are someone that has an interesting idea that you feel like you want to build from within,

I encourage you, work with the system. There is a lot of horsepower built up in these large organizations. Lean on the experts, learn from them. Will you go a little bit slower at times? Yes. Will you make compromises that you didn't want to make? Absolutely. Will the product be better for it?

100 percent. And that's what you want, and that's what it takes to be successful. Thank you. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnb's when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb.

It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. That was Dave Raggio speaking at TED Next. This talk was made in partnership with Intuit. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today.

TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefananos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.